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ElatedVenusaur posted...

The Persians probably weren't fielding much of "slaved" troops. Their army would have been a diverse collection of troops pulled from every corner of their vast empire at the behest of satraps and client rulers looking to get in on the glory of the empire's latest conquest. The core, of course, were the Persians themselves, including their elite infantry, the so-called Immortals.
This would have made their army unwieldy(lots of sub-commanders, all giving orders in different languages, who had varying levels of understanding of classical Persian) and uneven in quality. My (limited) understanding is that they generally weren't heavily-armed or armored and that their infantry generally fought in looser formations emphasizing mobility and flexibility. Thus they had great difficult against quality hoplites, who were generally heavily-armored(for the time) with metal shields and fought in a tight formation(though not as tight as a phalanx).

Salamis, I believe Themistocles tricked the Persians into believing a good portion of the Greek fleet would flee, and it appeared to, but it in fact rowed around Salamis and hit the Persian fleet in the rear as it engaged the rest of the Greek fleet in a narrow channel, which created panic in the Persian fleet(the backbone of which were Phoenician and Ionian Greek sailors) and led to a large portion of it becoming trapped and being destroyed. By then, it was already late in the campaign season, so not long after a lot of the army(along with Xerxes) went home, leaving a smaller force behind to winter in the portions of Greece which had submitted or been conquered. That was defeated the next year at Plataea, after which the Persians decided the whole affair wasn't worth pursuing further.

From my understanding Persian infantry fought by putting a barricade of shields in front of them while units armed with bows would fire from behind. Persian infantry did stand their ground, and according to Herodotos the Persians held the upper hand at Mycale as long as their barricade stayed up. But in a prolong melee the Persians could have been left without shields if the opposing infantry broke through their shield wall. At Plataea when the Immortals faced off against the Peloponnesians, including Spartans, they would've been very outnumbered since Herodotos heavily implies that each spartiate had with him seven helots and he implies that these helots fought in the same battleline as the spartiates.

Persian infantry was just one arm of the combined arms employed by the Persians. The infantry held their ground and pinned the enemy down while the Persian cavalry finished them off. This is how the Persians conquered the Ionian Greeks and crushed the Asiatic Greeks once again during the Ionian revolt. It's one of the big reasons Marathon was considered a big victory, it was the first time the Greeks had triumph over the Persians in a land battle and even at Marathon the Persian center still broke thought the Greek center. One of the big reasons the Greeks generally did not fight the Persians in pitched battle at the open plains, the Greeks were smart enough to realize the Persians would have crushed them there and they instead fought the Persians by guarding passes, using uneven terrain or using ambushes and trickery against the Persians. Xenophon records that his friend and king of Sparta Agesilaus II refused to fight the Persians in the open plains without proper cavalry support and instead turned to "skulking warfare" during his incursion at Asia Minor.

As for armor I don't really know being honest. Most hoplites wouldn't have been decked out in the full "men of bronze" get up since that was reserved for the rich that could afford it and being ad-hoc forces each man supplied himself with his armament. By the peloponnesian war most hoplites are depicted as simply wearing their tunics, a conical shaped helmet called the pilos and their aspis shield. Apparently the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus the Younger only wore their tunic, shield, pilos helmet and greaves but no body armor.

Since I'm typing this from mobile I can't look it up exactly but I believe Herodotos hints that the Persians had a better system of organization than the Greeks at the time. IIRC most Greek city-states, aside from Sparta, never had anything below the rank of Lochagos when it came to organization. These were ad-hoc forces with very minimal organization and training, if any, who favored aggression over organization. By the time Xenophon is writing about the battle of Cunaxa the Persians had learned to march in step in a calm and silent manner while the Greek forces had trouble organizing themselves and not causing a holler.

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